2023 Journal article Open Access

From unstructured texts to semantic story maps
Bartalesi V., Coro G., Lenzi E., Pagano P., Pratelli N.
Digital maps greatly support storytelling about territories, especially when enriched with data describing cultural, societal, and ecological aspects, conveying emotional messages that describe the territory as a whole. Story maps are interactive online digital narratives that can describe a territory beyond its map by enriching the map with text, pictures, videos, and other multimedia information. This paper presents a semi-automatic workflow to produce story maps from textual documents containing territory data. An expert first assembles one territory-contextual document containing text and images. Then, automatic processes use natural language processing and Wikidata services to (i) extract key concepts (entities) and geospatial coordinates associated with the territory, (ii) assemble a logically-ordered sequence of enriched story-map events, and (iii) openly publish online story maps and an interoperable Linked Open Data semantic knowledge base for event exploration and inter-story correlation analyses. Our workflow uses an Open Science-oriented methodology to publish all processes and data. Through our workflow, we produced story maps for the value chains and territories of 23 rural European areas of 16 countries. Through numerical evaluation, we demonstrated that territory experts considered the story maps effective in describing their territories, and appropriate for communicating with citizens and stakeholders.Source: International journal of digital earth (Online) 16 (2023): 234–250. doi:10.1080/17538947.2023.2168774
DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2023.2168774
Project(s): MOVING
Metrics:

See at: ISTI Repository | ISTI Repository | www.tandfonline.com | CNR ExploRA

2023 Journal article Open Access

D4SCIENCE: a unique infrastructure delivering virtual research environments as a service
Candela L., Castelli D., Pagano P.
Nowadays, research challenges - often based on the collaborative analysis of a large amount of data - require suitable infrastructures and user-facing solutions promoting multidisciplinary collaboration and appropriate communication and sharing of data, processes, and outcomes. The D4Science infrastructure and its virtual research environments proved to be a viable and effective solution for many communities of practice and use cases.Source: ERCIM news 133 (2023): 6–7.
Project(s): Blue Cloud , SoBigData-PlusPlus

See at: ercim-news.ercim.eu | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Journal article Open Access

The D4Science experience on virtual research environment development
Candela L., Castelli D., Pagano P.
Today, complex research challenges, often based on the analysis of a large amount of data, require multidisciplinary collaboration and appropriate communication and sharing of data, processes and outcomes. Technologies and large-scale infrastructures provide stakeholders with computing capacity and data services to perform unprecedented levels of data-driven scientific activities. This opens the way to science gateways and virtual research environments supporting researchers in scientific and educational activities. This article describes our extensive experience with the Virtual Research Environments (VRE) operated by the D4Science infrastructure. It presents how this infrastructure supports their development, their basic functionalities and how they are easily customised to serve the needs of specific user communities. It also describes how they are used in real contexts. The article concludes by reporting how VREs are now progressively used as valuable instruments to support open science and how this role might become more relevant in the future.Source: Computing in science & engineering (Online) 25 (2023). doi:10.1109/MCSE.2023.3290433
DOI: 10.1109/mcse.2023.3290433
Project(s): Blue Cloud , EOSC-Pillar , SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:

See at: ISTI Repository | ieeexplore.ieee.org | CNR ExploRA

2023 Journal article Open Access

ARIADNE Plus e il D4GNA-Dataset per il Geoportale Nazionale per l'Archeologia
Acconcia V., Boi V., Candela L., Falcone A., Mangiacrapa F., Massara F., Pagano P., Sinibaldi F.
L'articolo racconta l'esperienza del D4GNA - Dataset per il Geoportale Nazionale dell'Archeologia nato nell'ambito del progetto ARIADNEplus (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe - plus), conclusosi lo scorso 31 dicembre. Il contributo parte dal contesto più ampio del progetto europeo per addentrarsi nel mondo dei dati archeologici italiani; la soluzione tecnologica, la standardizzazione, la dematerializzazione e la condivisione in rete dei dati sono i temi toccati in questo percorso che ci illustra il procedere verso un obiettivo virtuoso: il Geoportale Nazionale per l'Archeologia (GNA). Il GNA, realizzato dall'Istituto Centrale per l'Archeologia (ICA) e che sarà in rete dal 10 luglio 2023, è il punto di accesso nazionale per accogliere e consultare gli interventi archeologici svolti sotto la direzione scientifica del Ministero della Cultura (MiC), le indagini archeologiche condotte da università e altri enti di ricerca, nonché altre banche dati territoriali.Source: Digitalia (Online) 1 (2023): 129–140. doi:10.36181/digitalia-00064
DOI: 10.36181/digitalia-00064
Project(s): ARIADNEplus
Metrics:

See at: digitalia.cultura.gov.it | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Contribution to conference Open Access

See at: inm.cnr.it | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Journal article Open Access

See at: content.iospress.com | ISTI Repository | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

The gCube geoportal platform
Candela L., Cirillo R., Mangiacrapa F., Pagano P., Sinibaldi F., Vannini G. L.
The gCube Geoportal platform is a component of the gCube open source software system conceived to support the creation and publication of georeferenced research objects, i.e. multi-part and multimedia research objects characterised by geospatial and temporal features. The Geoportal platform enables user communities to fully customise the data model characterising their instance by defining the structure, the content and the workflow of the potential research objects to be managed. `this report carefully describes the technology and documents how it was exploited to serve the development of a national catalogue for archaeological artifacts.Source: ISTI Technical Report, ISTI-2023-TR/012, 2023
DOI: 10.32079/isti-tr-2023/012
Project(s): ARIADNEplus , Blue Cloud
Metrics:

See at: CNR ExploRA

InfraScience research activity report 2023
Artini M., Assante M., Atzori C., Baglioni M., Bardi A., Bosio C., Bove P., Calanducci A., Candela L., Casini G., Castelli D., Cirillo R., Coro G., De Bonis M., Debole F., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Ibrahim A. S. T., La Bruzzo S., Lelii L., Manghi P., Mangiacrapa F., Mangione D., Mannocci A., Molinaro E., Pagano P., Panichi G., Paratore M. T., Pavone G., Piccioli T., Sinibaldi F., Straccia U., Vannini G. L.
InfraScience is a research group of the National Research Council of Italy - Institute of Information Science and Technologies (CNR - ISTI) based in Pisa, Italy. This report documents the research activity performed by this group in 2023 to highlight the major results. In particular, the InfraScience group engaged in research challenges characterising Data Infrastructures, e-Science, and Intelligent Systems. The group activity is pursued by closely connecting research and development and by promoting and supporting open science. In fact, the group is leading the development of two large scale infrastructures for Open Science, i.e. D4Science and OpenAIRE. During 2023 InfraScience members contributed to the publishing of several papers, to the research and development activities of several research projects (primarily funded by EU), to the organization of conferences and training events, to several working groups and task forces.Source: ISTI Annual Reports, 2023
DOI: 10.32079/isti-ar-2023/002
Project(s): Blue Cloud , EOSC Future , TAILOR
Metrics:

See at: CNR ExploRA

2023 Conference article Open Access

See at: oar.marine.ie | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Report Open Access

DESIRA D5.3 - Virtual Research Environment operation report years 3-4
Assante M., Candela L., Cirillo R., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Lelii L., Mangiacrapa F., Pagano P., Panichi G., Piccioli T.
This deliverable D5.3 "Virtual Research Environment Operation Report years 3-4" is the revised and updated version of deliverable D5.2 "Virtual Research Environment Operation Report years 1-2". It describes the activities carried out during the DESIRA project within Work Package 5. Specifically, in Task 5.1 "Knowledge Infrastructure: the DESIRA Virtual Research Environment" and Task 5.2 "Integration of Services and Tools and Use Reporting". It reports the procedures governing the operation of the VREs as well as the status of the aggregated resources at the end of the project in the DESIRA infrastructure. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are "systems" specifically conceived to provide their users with a web-based set of facilities (including services, data and computational facilities) to accomplish a set of tasks by dynamically relying on the underlying infrastructure. VREs are among the key products to be developed and delivered by the DESIRA project to support Project coordination, Living Labs activities and Rural Digitization Forums activities. The development of VREs is based on three main activities: (i) the development of software artefacts that realise a set of functions (including those needed for accessing specific datasets), (ii) the deployment of these artefacts in an operational infrastructure following the release procedures and tools, and (iii) the final deployment and operation of well-defined Virtual Research Environments by exploiting the facilities offered by the underlying D4Science infrastructure and its services [1, 2]. This report documents the last of the above three activities - i.e. the exploitation of the services and technologies offered by the underlying infrastructure to serve the needs of defined scenarios - as implemented in the context of the DESIRA project. The DESIRA Infrastructure Gateway offers end-user access to 14 VREs. As of May 2023, 14 VREs were created and operated. Specifically, the DESIRA Project VRE (cf. Sec 3.1.1) was created before the project kick-off. These VREs have served the needs of more than 390 users and more than 10.200 user sessions. This required dealing with 185 tickets (121 related to the project management, 43 requests for tasks, support and enhancements; 7 requests for incidents and bugs; 14 requests for VRE creations).Source: ISTI Project report, DESIRA, D5.3, 2023
Project(s): DESIRA

See at: ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Report Open Access

See at: ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

See at: CNR ExploRA

2023 Report Open Access

SoBigData-PlusPlus D9.2 - SoBigData e-Infrastructure Operation Report 2
Assante M., Candela L., Cirillo R., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Lelii L., Mangiacrapa F., Pagano P., Panichi G., Piccioli T.
This Deliverable D9.2 - "SoBigData e-Infrastructure Operation Report 2" is the revised version of the deliverable D9.1 - "SoBigData e-Infrastructure Operation Report 1" [3]. It reports on the activities carried out within Work Package 9 in the period from M19 (January 2021) to M36 (December 2022) for the SoBigData e- Infrastructure operation activity. It includes a detailed set of usage indicators (i.e., the number of users, access to resources, usage of resources from scientists, etc.). It also reports the deployment and procedures governing the operation of the Virtual Research Environments, the catalogue, and the services devoted to data analytics. A total of 17 Virtual Research Environments (VREs) have been created and/or operated to serve the needs arising in the context of the project. The SoBigData gateway (https://sobigdata.d4science.org/) provide its users with: 6 Exploratories VREs paired with the use cases (Demography, Economy & Finance 2.0; Migration Studies; Societal Debates and Misinformation Analysis; Social Impacts of AI and Explainable Machine Learning; Sports Data Science; Sustainable Cities for Citizens); 4 Virtual Lab VREs - SoBigDataLab and the OpenScienceGraphLab to exploit and experiment tools and solutions, the SoBigData-PlusPlus at DSAA 2021 Lab and the XAISS VLab, conceived to be the working environment for Hands-on Tutorials showing the services provided by SoBigData for the new generation of Responsible data scientists; 3 Applications VREs - TagME, SMAPH, M-Atlas; 2 Project Internal VREs - SoBigData.eu VRE for the communications and collaboration among project and initiative members and SBD-InfraCore VRE for supporting SoBigData++ WP9; 2 Literacy And Training VREs - the SoBigDataLiteracy, supporting Critical Data Literacy of task T.2.4, creating a curated collection of literature of interest for the SoBigData Community, and the e-Learning_Area VRE to host training materials developed within the SoBigData project. As of mid-December 2022, the e-infrastructure served more than 10,000 users by a total of more than 47,000 working sessions, with an average of 1350 working sessions per month with stable trend. This required to deal with approximately 130 issue tracker tickets (65 requests for support, 4 requests for incidents and bugs, 22 requests for new features, and 39 requests for Tasks, Virtual Machine or Container creations).Source: ISTI Project report, SoBigData-PlusPlus, D9.2, 2023
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus

See at: ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Report Open Access

SoBigData-PlusPlus D9.5 - SoBigData e-infrastructure common facilities 2
Assante M., Bardi A., Fernandez E., Lamata Martinez I., Lettere M., Manzi A., Pagano P.
Deliverable D9.5 "e-Infrastructure Common Facilities 2" is the revised version of Deliverable D9.4 "e- Infrastructure Common Facilities" intended to report the design principles and software architectures characterising the release and development of the SoBigData e-Infrastructure common facilities, namely the social mining computational engine, the online coding and workflow design frameworks, and the online science monitoring dashboard. This revised version of the document covers the first 36 months of the project, including up to date information on the progress for the existing common facilities documented in D9.4 Deliverable at M12, and information on common facilities developed between M12 and M36. Specifically, (i) the Social Mining Analytics Engine section has been enriched with a new service for performing collaborative data processing and mining on information sets (Cloud Computing Platform) and (ii) the Online Coding and Workflow section has been enriched with the report on the integration of Galaxy open-source platform for FAIR data analysis. The deliverable consists of six sections. Section 1 briefly introduces the role of this deliverable for the development and delivery of the SoBigData e-Infrastructure common facilities. Section 2 describes the SoBigData e-infrastructure logical architecture contextualising the common facilities and how they relate with the rest. Section 3, section 4 and section 5 document the first release of the e-Infrastructure common facilities included in this report and available at M36, reporting the design principles and reference architectures of the released solutions. Specifically, section 3 describes the social mining computational engine, Section 4 presents the online coding and workflow design frameworks - which includes the RStudio, the Jupyter Notebooks via JupyterHub, and Galaxy, Section 5 reports the online science monitoring dashboard. Finally, section 6 concludes the report illustrating the whole Release Management process and its components for continuous integration.Source: ISTI Project report, SoBigData-PlusPlus, D9.5, 2023
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus

See at: ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2023 Report Open Access

See at: ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA

2022 Journal article Open Access

Virtual research environments co-creation: the D4Science experience
Assante M., Candela L., Castelli D., Cirillo R., Coro G., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Lelii L., Lettere M., Mangiacrapa F., Pagano P., Panichi G., Piccioli T., Sinibaldi F.
Virtual research environments are systems called to serve the needs of their designated communities of practice. Every community of practice is a group of people dynamically aggregated by the willingness to collaborate to address a given research question. The virtual research environment provides its users with seamless access to the resources of interest (namely, data and services) no matter what and where they are. Developing a virtual research environment thus to guarantee its uptake from the community of practice is a challenging task. In this article, we advocate how the co-creation driven approach promoted by D4Science has proven to be effective. In particular, we present the co-creation options supported, discuss how diverse communities of practice have exploited these options, and give some usage indicators on the created VREs.Source: Concurrency and computation (Online) (2022). doi:10.1002/cpe.6925
DOI: 10.1002/cpe.6925
Project(s): AGINFRA PLUS , Blue Cloud , EOSC-Pillar , SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:

See at: ISTI Repository | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | CNR ExploRA

Story Map Building and Visualising Tool (SMBVT)
Lenzi E., Bartalesi V., Pratelli N., Coro G., Pagano P.
In the context of the MOVING (MOuntain Valorisation through INterconnectedness and Green growth) project, we released an open-source software - the MOVING Story Map Building and Visualization Tool (SMBVT) - that allows users to create and visualise story maps within a collaborative environment and using a user-friendly Web interface. The tool uses Semantic Web technologies and the Narrative Ontology to represent the stories of the MOVING mountain Value Chains. The MOVING community access SMBVT through The MOVING story map Virtual Research Environment and creates the events of the story. For each event, the user can add: a title, a textual description, start and end dates, the geographic coordinates, a media object (i.e. a video or image), notes, and digital objects. The tool takes Wikidata as reference KB and assigns Wikidata Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) to the story components (i.e. the entities that take part in an event). All the knowledge collected by SMBVT is stored in a JSON Postgres DB. When a story is completed, the tool automatically creates the corresponding visualisation using StoryMapJS library and makes available a corresponding URL that can be freely shared. Finally, SMBVT saves the collected knowledge as a Web Ontology Language (OWL) graph and publishes it as a Linked Open Data.Project(s): "CMG Collaborative Research": A Systematic Approach to Large Amplitude Internal Wave Dynamics: An Integrated Mathematical, Observational, and Remote Sensing Model, Blue Cloud , MOVING

See at: github.com | CNR ExploRA

Virtual research environments ethnography: a preliminary study
Arezoumandan M., Candela L., Castelli D., Ghannadrad A., Mangione D., Pagano P.
This dataset is accompanying the paper "Virtual Research Environments Ethnography: a Preliminary Study" paper published at 14th International Workshop on Science Gateways 15th-17th June 2022, Trento, Italy. This is a systematic mapping study on the literature about Science gateways, Virtual Research Environments, and Virtual Laboratories.DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6481183
Project(s): Blue Cloud , EOSC-Pillar , DESIRA , SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:

See at: CNR ExploRA

2022 Conference article Open Access

See at: ISTI Repository | ieeexplore.ieee.org | CNR ExploRA

2022 Contribution to conference Open Access

Blue-Cloud: exploring and demonstrating the potential of Open Science for ocean sustainability
Schaap D., Assante M., Pagano P., Candela L.
The Blue-Cloud project is part of 'The Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative' of the European Commission and runs since October 2019. It has established a pilot cyber platform, providing researchers access to multidisciplinary datasets and derived data products from observations, in-situ and satellite-based, analytical services, and computing facilities essential for blue science to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability. A number of core services have been delivered and are now in a phase of wider dissemination and uptake by marine researchers. Core services are the Federated Data Discovery & Access Service (DD&AS), the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE), and five Blue-Cloud Virtual Labs.Source: MetroSEA 2022 - IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for the Sea, Milazzo, Italy, 3-5/10/2022
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7143580
Project(s): Blue Cloud
Metrics:

See at: ISTI Repository | zenodo.org | CNR ExploRA